Sylvia Sidney

Sylvia Sidney - On stage or screen, she was always an actress

3 July 1999, National Post

Sylvia Sidney, who has died aged 88, was one of the most durable character actresses in Hollywood, with a particular line in vulnerable but plucky heroines that helped make her a star in the realistic movies of the 1930s.
Sabotage, 1936
In Sabotage (1936)

Miss Sidney was determined to be an actress at the age of 15 and perfected her craft over seven decades in a versatile mix of 40 films, 100 classical and modern plays and dozens of television appearances.

With her heart-shaped face, large, moist eyes and tremulous voice, she played anguished film heroines in Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets (1931), Josef von Sternberg's An American Tragedy (1931), King Vidor's Street Scene (1931), Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) and William Wyler's Dead End (1937). She also starred in the first three American films directed by Fritz Lang: Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), and You and Me (1938).

In Lang's stark cinema of social injustice, the film historian David Thomson wrote, Miss Sidney "caught exactly the fragile happiness allowed in Lang's world and played with a restraint that perfectly matched the fatal simplicity of the plots. There are close-ups in Fury of Sidney watching Spencer Tracey in a burning jail, as harrowed an any Lillian Gish close-ups."

To younger generations she was known as one of the dotty detectives in the television movie Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate (1971), with Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick, and for her role as Juno, the grumpy, chain-smoking social worker from the great beyond in the movie Beetlejuice (1985) - a part she described as "great."

She was born Sophia Kosow in the Bronx, NY, on August 8, 1910. Her parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who divorced when she was nine. Soon afterward she was adopted by her mother's second husband, whose name she assumed.

She was a shy girl, and was sent to elocution and dancing lessons from the age of 10 to overcome a slight stutter. She left high school as a teenager to study acting at the Theater Guild school in Manhattan and was soon expelled for staying out late. Nonetheless, she obtained a dozen roles and favourable notices in Broadway plays, including a 1928 drama, Gods of the Lightning, and a 1930 comedy, Bad Girl. She caught the attention of Hollywood talent scouts, was signed to a contract with Paramount Pictures and arrived in Hollywood at the advent of the "talkies".

Miss Sidney was grateful for the tutelage of her first film directors. In 1977, she remarked: "King Vidor and Mamoulian, of course, I adored. Fritz Lang and I became dear friends, though we had awful fights."

But she was soon typecast as a poor little working girl, and she grew to deplore the repetition of playing "the girl of the gangster, then the sister who was bringing up the gangster, then later the mother of the gangster, and they always had me ironing somebody's shirt.

"They used to pay me by the teardrop," she added ruefully.

Miss Sidney also resented being treated as studio property. She considered herself an actress, not a star, and to escape her image she returned to Broadway, where she had triumphs in The Gentle People (1939) and the thriller Angel Street (1941). She also appeared in Ben Hecht's To Quito and Back (1937), Carl Reiner and Joseph Stein's Enter Laughing (1963) and Tennessee William's Vieux Carre (1977).

"I didn't leave Hollywood because of anybody but myself," she said of those years. "I just got disgusted with myself. I didn't know who I was, as an actress or a person."
Sylvia Sidney

Eventually she expanded her gallery of screen characters to include a chic Eurasian double-agent in Blood on the Sun (1945), an idealistic journalist in The Searching Wind (1946), a drudge in Les Misérables (1952) and a hard-bitten matriarch in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress.

In the 1980s her films included Hammett, Corrupt and Beetlejuice. In 1996 she had a cameo in Mars Attacks! as a prairie woman.

Among Miss Sidney's dozens of starring television roles were acclaimed performances as a cancer-ridden patient in The Shadow Box (1980), directed by Paul Newman, and as a plain-spoken but compassionate grandmother of a homosexual AIDS patient in An Early Frost (1985).

Sylvia as Clia
as "Clia"
Miss Sidney last appeared on screen in 1998 in several episodes of a revived version of Fantasy Island, for which she had a seven-year contract for a recurring role. But the program was cancelled.

Tough and sharp-witted, as Miss Sidney grew older her voice deepened to a sandpaper growl. She regarded her life and her career as inseparable. "There isn't a role that I wouldn't accept, provided it's good and has something to say," she once said. "I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I retired. I'm an actress and I have to work. As long as I have got a brain and I can remember the lines and they pay me well, I will do it."

Miss Sidney's main recreation when she wasn't working was needlepoint. Her designs are sold as kits, and she wrote two popular instruction books on the art: Sylvia Sidney's Needlepoint Book (1968) and The Sylvia Sidney Question and Answer Book on Needlepoint (1975).

Miss Sidney's three marriages, to the publisher and writer Bennett Cerf, the actor Luther Adler and to Carlton Alsop, an advertising executive, all ended in divorce. Her only child, Jacob Adler, died in 1987. She leaves no survivors.

The New York Times, with files from the Los Angeles Times

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